Thursday, January 10, 2008

Joining Microsoft Live Labs

Live Labs is an applied research group affiliated with Microsoft Research and MSN. The group has the enjoyable goal of not only trying to solve hard problems with broad impact, but also getting useful research work out the door and into products so it can help as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

Live Labs is lead by Gary Flake, the former head of Yahoo Research. It is a fairly new group, formed only two years ago. Gary wrote a manifesto that has more information about Live Labs.

While you're there, maybe you can finally figure out something you have pointed out several times in the past: the Micro$oft naming puzzle: MSN vs Windows Live vs live.com etc ...

Just curious: is this because MSN/Live is the underdog or Micro$oft is the Gorilla or because of the Seattle location or because of the cool people? After all, Google has two offices in the Seattle area with a few heavyweights of their own, and they are equally a combination of gorilla and underdog, depending on the area you look at ...